The viewability problem is considerable, with more than half of all ads not being seen by humans. But how effective are those ads that are seen?

Also, how do ads perform relative to the industry standards?

How is ‘viewable’ defined?

According to the Media Ratings Council (MRC) a banner ad is considered viewable if it is at least 50% in view for at least one second.

A rich media ad only needs to be 30% in view for the same duration, whereas a video ad must be 50% in view for a minimum of two consecutive seconds.

IPG Media Lab said it did not set out to recommend changes to the MRC standards, nor to develop a new standard.

However it found that ads that exceed the MRC standard have 16% recall as opposed to ads that meet the standard, which have just 2% recall.

The research

A total of 9,876 people took part, and were shown one of 189 different ad scenarios on web pages that “matched their typical consumption habits”. In addition, eyetracking was employed for a subset of the panel.

The participants were then invited to complete a post-exposure survey to see if the brand metrics were affected.

The findings

No surprises: viewability is highly related to ad effectiveness. However, the duration is way more important than how much of the ad is in view.

However, while those ads that met the MRC standard attracted the attention of around half of the participants, they performed no better than ads that didn’t meet the standard.

For video ads, the MRC standard (two seconds/50% in view) only results in 10% ad recall, but if fully in view for seven seconds ad recall triples to 30%.

Unfortunately for the UX purists, autosound results in 275% uplift in effectiveness, from 8% ad recall to 22%. ‘Audio on’ is unsurprisingly more effective for ads not in view, though the study did not record the amount of people who had a negative response to audio (I’d wager that not all ad recall positively affects propensity to buy).

What was surprising was that there are “no additional gains in effectiveness” when ads were contextually matched to content.

The research concludes that “viewability is important, but is not the end-all-be-all. It isn’t a KPI.”

Chris Lake is co-founder of Empirical Proof and a writer for Search Engine Watch.

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.